


Five Ways Ben Might Have Died

by mayfriend



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Assassination, Ben Hargreeves' Tentacles | Bentacles, Canonical Character Death, Child Murder, Disturbing Themes, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Canon, Suicide, Vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2020-01-01 05:34:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18329642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/pseuds/mayfriend
Summary: ...and One Time He Lived.





	Five Ways Ben Might Have Died

**Author's Note:**

> Abstract little nonsense mainly inspired by the fact nobody knows how Ben fucking died. Like, not even his actor. So this is just a thing that I thought up to make myself sad with the possibilities, and if I have to be sad (I don't, I did this to myself) then you do too.

> **I. OVERLOAD**

Luther didn’t know. Luther didn’t _know._ It was something Dad had always told them to do, if it looked like Ben couldn’t control the Horror - knock him out, and the cryptids living inside their brother  would be stopped from pushing their way into this world and causing untold havoc. Ben had been screaming, like he'd never screamed before, and more and more eldritch limbs were pushing into the world than ever before, and Luther did as he was told like he always, always has before.

 _(Daddy's blunt little instrument,_ Vanya writes in her book, and it hurts.)

Dad didn't tell them that a side effect of stopping their progress would be the ripping apart of the vessel that gave them entry to this dimension in the first place. Luther tells himself that Dad didn't know either, that he couldn't have, that if he had he wouldn't have given the order. He has to believe it, because if he doesn't- if he doesn't-

None of the others believe it; they all leave rather than stay in the house with either of them. Even Allison. Luther might have left as well if he hadn't been the one to do it. If he hadn't been the one to come home dripping in their brother's blood.

(Before they leave, the others keep on asking Klaus if he can summon Ben, even when he's high as a kite and they all know he can't summon shit in that state. Luther doesn't ask, because he is so, so scared of what Ben's ghost might say. Klaus pretends, in the end, probably thinks he's being kind, goes to Luther and tells him that Ben forgives him, says its not his fault. Luther almost kills a second brother that night in his rage.)

There is barely enough of him left to bury. 

> **II. ACCIDENT**

The Horror is not Ben. Ben is not the Horror. The Horror is a part of Ben, except it isn’t, except it is. He hates the Horror, the monsters, the terrible voices of the things that are Old and Evil and inside of him, always, always, hissing  _let us out, let us in, open up, free us._ Ben can't remember when they haven't been there, pressing on the back of his mind like a tumour.

He’s sixteen when he tries to vivisect himself, separate the boy from the beings with a white hot knife and a stick between his teeth. He wasn't high or drunk, he was just tired. He bleeds out on the bathroom floor, and doesn’t scream, not once.

When he comes back, they're still there, because of course they are.

> **III. MISTAKE**

It’s something as benign as a mix up. Ben gets shot - a flesh wound, barely clipping his shoulder, but quite a bleeder - and it’s quicker to go to the general hospital than get him back to the Academy a few thousand miles away.

When he’s told about his adoptive son’s condition, Reginald Hargreeves nods shortly, hires a company nurse whose only instructions are not to gossip about her charge to the general nurses and doctors (the Academy’s reputation is paramount, after all) and leaves without saying goodbye. Some poor overworked idiot in the lab of that particular hospital mislabel a vat of B- as O-. Ben’s blood type is A+. When the nurse asks Ben how he’s feeling, mind more on the hundreds of forms she had to sign before she got given the job, he says fine, because he’s been taught from an early age that to complain is to be weak and to be weak is to be useless.

Turns out, that impending sense of doom Ben was feeling? Turns out that wasn't weakness but a recognized symptom of his body rejecting the transfusion. Whoops.

It’s ridiculous. It’s horrific. It’s hysterical. He went up against villains and hostage-takers and gunmen and super spies, and Ben dies alone in a hospital bed at sixteen years old. He didn't get to finish his book,  _Murder on the Orient Express._

Klaus’ screaming wakes up the entire house at four in the morning, a few minutes before the phone rings to inform them of the news officially.

> **IV. SUICIDE**

Ben doesn’t want to be a monster anymore. He doesn’t want to hurt people anymore. He wants it to be over, he’s wanted it to be over for as long as he’s known what _it_ is.

He slits his wrists and ends it. He downs a bottle of sleeping pills and ends it. He sews rocks into his pockets, runs the bath, and ends it.

(Except it doesn’t end.)

> **V. MURDER**

Ever since they were revealed to the world, there have been people trying to kill them. Usually they don’t even get as past the front door before they’re tripped up by the security system, Mom with her guardian mode or on one very memorable occasion Pogo decapitating them with a blade that he apparently keeps in his cane.

They come from everywhere - other countries, secret services, terrorist organisations, religious cults who see them as a collection of Antichrists. They aren’t _scary,_ not really, not compared to some of the things they’ve seen, some of the people they’ve stopped, some of the monsters they've faced. Humanity isn't as terrifying as it should be, and they learn a little too late that all the worst monsters are human.

Here is the truth: each of them blames themselves.

They grew complacent, cocky, didn’t bother to take down the sniper setting up across the road from the power plant because they dismissed him as dangerous. It takes Ben’s head exploding while they’re rounding up the last of the terrorists for them to really pay attention.

He dies, messy and quick - his killer is not afforded the same luxury - and the Umbrella Academy falls to pieces with one well-aimed bullet

> **\+ LIFE**

Ben has been dead for thirteen years. Ben has been dead for thirteen years, but then they’re falling, him and Klaus and all the others, falling seventeen years into the past, and Ben breathes for the first time in over a decade.

It hurts a little. He doesn't care. He's missed everything about living, even the pain.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [mayfriend](http://mayfriend.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
